Sandy Weill Is "Incredibly Sad" About Citi And He Thinks It Was Totally Fine When He Left It

When Sandy Weill merged Citicorp and Traveler's Group in the late 1990s to create Citigroup, forever shattering Glass-Steagall, no one could ever predict the impact obanking's new monolith would have.

Now, in a New York Times profile, Weill discusses at length how it feels to watch the product of his creation he is best known for fall from grace.

Notably he defends the Citigroup (C) he left, arguing that the current mess is the result of subsequent management:

NYT: Mr. Weill vigorously defends his record, rebutting critics who say that Citi was an unstable creation. Judah Kraushaar, a hedge fund manager and former banking analyst who worked with Mr. Weill on his autobiography, said that Citi’s problem wasn’t that it was unmanageable, but that it lacked enough good managers — and that Mr. Weill was a good manager.

“When he left, the company had all the hallmarks of how Sandy ran a business: it was lean; it didn’t have a bloated balance sheet,” says Mr. Kraushaar. “Had he picked a different successor things could have turned out very differently.”

At one point, Mr. Weill had hoped to return and help the company recover and to defend his legacy himself. But the bank no longer has a place or a need for its old C.E.O. Now, Mr. Weill, 76, is trying to move on to a life without Citi.

“It’s never going to be the same company that it was,” he said one morning shortly before Christmas.